Mastery (54 page)

At some point in history, the original navigators in this region must have felt a great degree of fear as they confronted the need to travel to find other food sources, realizing the tremendous dangers this involved. The ocean must have seemed much more chaotic than the tiny patch of land on their islands. They slowly overcame this fear and evolved a system that was magnificently suited to the environment they lived in. In this part of the world, the night sky is particularly clear through much of the year, giving them the ability to use the changing position of stars to great effect. Using smaller craft allowed them to maintain closer contact with the water, which they had learned to read as accurately as the undulating earth on their island. Imagining themselves as stationary and the islands as moving helped them keep track of their reference points and had a calming effect. They did not depend on a single tool or instrument; this elaborate system existed entirely
in their minds. By building a deep connection to the environment and reading all of the available signs, the Islanders could approximate the remarkable instinctual powers of animals, such as various bird species that can navigate around the globe through their extreme sensitivity to the earth’s geomagnetic field.

Understand: the ability to connect deeply to your environment is the most primal and in many ways the most powerful form of mastery the brain can bring us. It applies equally well to the waters of Micronesia as it does to any modern field or office. We gain such power by first transforming ourselves into consummate observers. We see everything in our surroundings as a potential sign to interpret. Nothing is taken at face value. Like the Islanders, we can break these observations down into various systems. There are the people with whom we work and interact—everything they do and say reveals something hidden below the surface. We can look at our interactions with the public, how they respond to our work, how people’s tastes are constantly in flux. We can immerse ourselves in every aspect of our field, paying deep attention, for example, to the economic factors that play such a large role. We become like the Proustian spider, sensing the slightest vibration on our web. Over the years, as we progress on this path, we begin to merge our knowledge of these various components into an overall feel for the environment itself. Instead of exerting and overtaxing ourselves to keep up with a complex, changing environment, we know it from the inside and can sense the changes before they happen.

For the Caroline Islanders, there was nothing unconventional in their approach to mastery; their method fit perfectly their circumstances. But for us, in our advanced technological age, such mastery involves making an unconventional choice. To become such sensitive observers, we must not succumb to all of the distractions afforded by technology; we must be a little primitive. The primary instruments that we depend on must be our eyes for observing and our brains for analyzing. The information afforded to us through various media is only one small component in our connection to the environment. It is easy to become enamored with the powers that technology affords us, and to see them as the end and not the means. When that happens, we connect to a virtual environment, and the power of our eyes and brain slowly atrophy. You must see your environment as a physical entity and your connection to it as visceral. If there is any instrument you must fall in love with and fetishize, it is the human brain—the most miraculous, awe-inspiring, information-processing tool devised in the known universe, with a complexity we can’t even begin to fathom, and with dimensional powers that far outstrip any piece of technology in sophistication and usefulness.

2. Play to your strengths—Supreme Focus

A.
In the first years of the life of their child, the parents of Albert Einstein (1879–1955) had cause for concern. It took longer than usual for little Albert to talk, and his first attempts at language were always so halting. (See
here
and
here
for more on Einstein.) He had a strange habit of first muttering to himself the words he was going to speak out loud. His parents were concerned that their son might have a mental deficiency, and they consulted a doctor. Soon, however, he lost his hesitancy with words and revealed some hidden mental strengths—he was good with puzzles, had a knack for certain sciences, and he loved playing the violin, particularly anything by Mozart, whose music he would play over and over.

The problems began again, however, as he advanced his way through school. He was not a particularly good student. He hated having to memorize so many facts and numbers. He hated the stern authority of the teachers. His grades were mediocre and, concerned for his future, the parents decided to send their sixteen-year-old son to a more liberal-minded school in the town of Aarau, near their home in Zurich. This school used a method developed by the Swiss educational reformer Johann Pestalozzi, which emphasized the importance of learning through one’s own observations, leading to the development of ideas and intuitions. Even mathematics and physics were taught in this manner. There were no drills or facts to memorize; instead, the method placed supreme importance on visual forms of intelligence, which Pestalozzi saw as the key to creative thinking.

In this atmosphere, young Einstein suddenly thrived. He found the place intensely stimulating. The school encouraged students to learn on their own, wherever their inclinations would take them, and for Einstein this meant delving even more deeply into Newtonian physics (a passion of his) and recent advances in the study of electromagnetism. In his studies of Newton while at Aarau, he came upon some problems in the Newtonian concept of the universe that deeply troubled him and caused him many sleepless nights.

According to Newton, all phenomena in nature can be explained through simple mechanical laws. Knowing them, we can deduce the causes for almost everything that happens. Objects move through space according to these mechanical laws, such as laws of gravity, and all of these movements can be measured mathematically. It is a universe that is highly ordered and rational. But Newton’s concept relied upon two assumptions that could never be proven or verified empirically: the existence of absolute time and space, both of which were thought to exist independently of living beings and objects. Without these assumptions there would be no supreme standard
of measurement. The brilliance of his system, however, was hard to call into question, considering that based on his laws scientists could accurately measure the movements of sound waves, the diffusion of gases, or the motion of stars.

In the late nineteenth century, however, certain cracks began to emerge in Newton’s concept of the mechanical universe. Based on the work of Michael Faraday, the great Scottish mathematician James Maxwell made some interesting discoveries about the properties of electromagnetism. Developing what became known as field theories, Maxwell asserted that electromagnetism should not be described in terms of charged particles, but rather in terms of fields in space that have the continual potential to be converted into electromagnetism; this field consists of vectors of stress that can be charged at any point. By his calculations, electromagnetic waves move at the speed of 186,000 miles per second, which happens to be the speed of light. This could not simply be some coincidence. Light must therefore be a visible manifestation of an entire spectrum of electromagnetic waves.

This was a groundbreaking and novel concept of the physical universe, but to make it consistent with Newton, Maxwell and others assumed the existence of a “light-bearing ether,” a substance that could oscillate and produce these electromagnetic waves, analogous to water for ocean waves, or air for sound waves. This concept added one more absolute to the Newtonian equation—that of absolute rest. The speed of the movement of these waves could only be measured against the backdrop of something at rest, which would be the ether itself. This ether would have to be something strange—covering the entire universe but not in any way interfering with the movement of planets or objects.

Scientists around the world had been struggling for decades to prove somehow the existence of this ether, concocting all sorts of elaborate experiments, but it seemed an impossible quest, and this raised increasingly more questions about the Newtonian universe and the absolutes on which it depended. Albert Einstein devoured everything he could about Maxwell’s work and the questions it raised. Einstein himself had a basic need to believe in laws, in the existence of an ordered universe, and experiencing doubts on these laws caused him great anxiety.

One day, in the midst of all of these thoughts and while still attending the school at Aarau, an image appeared in his mind: that of a man moving at the speed of light itself. As he pondered this image, it turned into a sort of puzzle, or what he would later call a thought experiment: if the man were moving at the speed of light alongside a light beam, he should be able to “observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest though spatially oscillating.”

Intuitively, however, this made no sense to him for two reasons. The moment the man would look at the light source to see the beam, the light pulse would be moving ahead of him at the speed of light; he could not perceive it otherwise, since visible light travels at that constant speed. The speed of the light pulse with respect to the observer would still be 186,000 miles per second. The law governing the speed of light or any electromagnetic wave would have to be the same to someone standing still on Earth, or someone theoretically moving at the speed of light. There could not be two separate laws. And yet in theory it still could be supposed that one could catch up with and see the wave itself before it appeared as light. It was a paradox, and it made him unbearably anxious as he contemplated it.

The next year Einstein entered the Zurich Polytechnic Institute, and once again his dislike for traditional schooling returned. He did not do particularly well at math. He disliked the way physics was taught, and he started taking many classes in totally unrelated fields. He was not a promising student, and had not attracted the attention of any important professor or mentor. He quickly developed a disdain for academia and the constrictions it placed on his thinking. Still deeply troubled by his thought experiment, he continued to work on it on his own. He spent months devising an experiment that could perhaps allow him to detect the ether and its effects on light, but a professor at the Polytechnic revealed to him that his experiment was unworkable. He gave Einstein a paper describing all of the failed attempts to detect ether that had been attempted by eminent scientists, perhaps trying to deflate the pretensions of a twenty-year-old student who thought he could uncover what the greatest scientists in the world had failed to accomplish.

A year later, in 1900, Einstein came to a life-changing decision about himself: He was not an experimental scientist. He was not good at devising experiments and he did not enjoy the process. He had several strengths—he was a marvel at solving abstract puzzles of any kind; he could turn them over in his mind, converting them into images he could manipulate and shape at will. And because of his natural disdain of authority and conventions, he could think in ways that were novel and flexible. This meant of course that he would never succeed in the slippery world of academia. He would have to blaze his own path, but this could be an advantage. He would not be burdened by the need to fit in or adhere to the standard paradigm.

Continuing to work on his thought experiment day and night, he finally came to a conclusion—something had to be wrong with the entire notion of the physical universe as described by Newton. Scientists were going at the problem from the wrong end: they were straining to prove the existence of the ether in order to maintain the Newtonian edifice. Although Einstein admired Newton, he had no ties to any school of thought. Considering his
decision to work on his own, he could be as daring as he liked. He would throw out the idea of the ether itself and all of the absolutes that could not be verified. His way forward would be to deduce the laws, the principles that governed motion, through his reasoning powers and through mathematics. He did not need a university position or any laboratory to do this. Wherever he found himself, he could work on these problems.

As the years went by, it would seem to others that Einstein was a bit of a failure. He had graduated from the Polytechnic close to the bottom of his class. He could not find any kind of teaching job and had settled for a mediocre, low-paid position as an evaluator of inventions for the Swiss patent office in Bern. But free to continue on his own, he worked with unbelievable tenacity at this one problem. Even while apparently on the job at the patent office, he would focus for hours on the theory that was forming in his mind; even when out for a walk with friends, he would continue to ponder his ideas—he had the unusual ability to listen on one track and think on another. He carried with him a little notebook and filled it up with all kinds of ideas. He reflected on his original paradox and all of the embellishments it had undergone and played around with them endlessly in his mind, imagining a thousand different possibilities. During almost every waking hour he contemplated the problem from some angle or other.